Pick a Topic

Find a topic#

Given you now know your target audience, there are two things to sort out before you even start writing your title or abstract.

First, you have to find a topic. This is, at its simplest, finding the intersection between the things you’re very interested in and the things that everyone else is interested in. The simple reason for this disparity in interest is that you’re gonna be spending a bunch more time on this topic than the audience is, but you still need an audience to show up (and, more to the point, for CFP reviewers to rate you highly).

This intersection might either seem daunting or too broad to be useful.

If you find it daunting#

If you find it daunting, you don’t need to have a ton of production experience in the topic to give a talk on it. You don’t need to be the creator of the framework or library. You don’t need to understand its internals. As long as you’ve probably spent more time on your particular topic than your audience, they’ll have something to learn from you. To some extent, you can even “mortgage your future” a bit – propose a talk on something you want to learn before you’ve learned it, and use the talk acceptance as an artificial deadline. I don’t recommend always doing this, but I’ve seen it work well.

If you find it too broad to be useful#

If you find it too broad to be useful, understand that, in aggregate, the interests of large groups of people are predictable. They always want to know what the future holds. They always want a comprehensive introduction to something popular. They always want real-life “war stories” of things they’ll probably have to do in the future, from people who’ve successfully been through it.

Developers always want easy ways to add design touches without being a designer, and vice versa, for designers. If you need ideas, think about which of your experiences overlap with hot topics. Accessibility, automation, AI, design systems, no code, GraphQL, serverless, service discovery, infrastructure as code. Everyone has the same insecurities, and in a way, you are there to satisfy their insecurities. Conference organizers look to other conferences for inspiration, and so should you.

📝 To be EXTRA CLEAR here: Use this tactic only if you need it. It is perfectly fine to do a talk about non hyped technologies, but people do respond to buzzwords!

Look at community watering holes#

A reliable way of gauging the interest of others is to look at community watering holes. What topics keep coming up on Hacker News, Twitter, or Reddit? You can niche down from megacommunities to industry ones. For Web development; this would be sites like Dev.to, CSS Tricks, and Smashing Magazine. What are the most active GitHub repos? What are megatrends on package downloads? What are framework and library core team members putting out? What are company leaders (whether ones you work at or just notable ones in the news) doing that is interesting? However, be aware that sometimes people don’t know what they want until they see it.

Write blogs#

You can also gauge relative and your prersonal interest by creating more. Blog more and see which blog posts get abnormal traction. Twitter, Hacker News, and Reddit are wonderful feedback mechanisms to gauge interest. The MVP of a talk is a blog post.

Create demos#

If you aren’t a great writer, that’s fine; you can also create demos. Diana Smith has made a career of CSS art, and I’ve never read a blog post of hers. You can bet she’ll be accepted to speak anywhere (I’m pretty sure she has spoken, I just can’t find it right now). Your YouTube watch history and GitHub timeline are also great indicators of your revealed interests.

More demand for technical talks#

A special note on nontechnical talks: I love them. Conference organizers don’t. Advice on career management, impostor syndrome, salary negotiation, working remote, learning in public? They are great and last longer than any technology you choose. Conferences should have more of them, but they don’t.

The reality is that the ultimate customers of conferences are the bosses of the people attending conferences. They want to see some “I can use this at work” return on investment by sending their employees. Most bosses find sending people to technically-heavy conferences easier to justify; hence there is more demand for technical talks. Less cynically, the timeframes for measuring and getting a return on investment (two to three, the stereotypical tenure of an in-demand tech worker) dictate what you invest in.

Incorporate the social impact#

If you work at a mission-driven company, for example, a non-profit, government entity, school system, or museum, definitely see how you can incorporate your social impact into your talk. Developers are always looking for more inspiration on how their tech reaches out to the “real world”, because most of us spend all day working on SaaS apps and marketing pages.